Sunday, December 18, 2011

How the Rainbow Works, by Al Young

Mostly we occupy ocular zones, clinging
only to what we think we can see.
We can't see wind or waves of thought,
electrical fields or atoms dancing;
only what they do or make us believe.

Look on all of life as color -
vibratile movement, heart-centered,
from invisibility to the merely visible.
Never mind what happens when one of us dies.
Where were you before you even get born?
Where am I and all the unseeable souls
we love at this moment, or loathed
before birth? Where are we right now?

Everything that ever happened either
never did or always will with variations.
Let's put it another way: Nothing ever
happened that wasn't dreamed, that wasn't
sketched from the start with artful surprises.
Think of the dreamer as God, a painter,
a ham, to be sure, but a divine old master
whose medium is light and who sidesteps
tedium by leaving room both inside and outside
this picture for subjects and scenery to wing it.

Look on death as living color too: the dyeing
of fabric, submersion into a temporary sea,
a spectruming beyond the reach of sensual
range which, like time, is chained to change;
the strange notion that everything we've
ever done or been in until now is past
history, is gone away, is bleached, bereft,
perfect, leaving the scene clean to freshen
with pigment and space and leftover light.

welcome

Manuela

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're now just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature. A poem can add its grain to all the other grains and that is, I think, a rather important thing to do.- Adrienne Rich

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant. - Denise Levertov

Before, under, and through the wonderful terrible wrestling with words and music there is a state of mind which I’m calling ‘poetic attention’ ... a sort of readiness, a species of longing which is without the desire to possess, and it does not really wish to be talked about. - Don McKay

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I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. - Ursula Le Guin